Stories about: Avanade

With Microsoft increasingly talking up cloud computing it is not unexpected that Avanade, the consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform, and which was co-founded by Microsoft, is starting to talk up the benefits of running services in the cloud. To get a little more of a local insight where he thinks the market is positioned and what Avanade can offer organisations, we spoke to Craig Dower, managing director, Avanade Australia.

Microsoft integrator Avanade has developed a tool that will assist organizations looking to measure the ROI (return on investment) that can be achieved when optimizing their data centers.

The end game for corporate identity architectures is an "identity bus" that off-the-shelf applications can plug into in order to authenticate users and provide access control, according to Microsoft.

It might seem that Microsoft's decision to delay the availability of Windows Vista's first Service Pack for another six weeks due to driver problems is grounded in fear of further alienating consumers, who haven't exactly embraced the new operating system.

When Lionbridge Technologies, a US software localization vendor, rolled out Microsoft's unified communications (UC) software starting in 2006, it let its 4,300 employees keep using public instant messaging services such as AIM or Yahoo Messenger.

While collaboration and communication technologies are widely acknowledged to be beneficial within the enterprise, surprisingly, less than half of Canadian and US organizations have actually developed a strategy that they're happy with.

Web server survey site Netcraft's recent report may have indicated Microsoft's IIS is gaining ground over the venerable open source Apache HTTP server, but version 7.0 is promising to take the challenge to the next level.

Microsoft will tag its next server software, now codenamed Longhorn, with the prosaic "Windows Server 2007," according to a document on the company's site.

Certainly no coincidence, Microsoft has decked out its much-anticipated OS upgrade with beautiful landscape wallpapers -- vistas, to be exact. But, as calming as these background images may be for end-users getting acquainted with Vista, for IT directors, the landscape approaching an enterprise rollout of any new Windows operating system has always been rocky. Convincing management with compelling ROI, quelling grumpy user rebellions, and making sure the whole thing doesn't blow up in your face are by now well-known impediments along any Windows migration path. It's enough to make IT departments considering the journey downright cautious.

Server virtualization is an efficient way to save on server hardware costs, real estate, and management resources, but it isn't the only way. Just ask the folks at Avanade, a systems integrator specializing in Microsoft solutions. For one government customer, Avanade had originally designed hundreds of SQL Servers in highly available MSCS (Microsoft Cluster Server) clusters, but the system was spiraling out of control.